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Madrid (AFP) - Leonor remembers the long corridor of the Spanish maternity ward where she saw her newborn daughter disappear in 1964, taken away by a nurse, like it was just minutes ago. The next day she was falsely told by hospital staff that her daughter had died. Her baby was just one of tens of thousands of newborns who were snatched from mothers and fathers deemed politically dangerous to General Francisco Franco's dictatorship by a network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns, and given to other families. Now four decades after Franco's death on November 20, 1975, the scandal over the "stolen babies" of the regime looks set to go unpunished. "It was just a few seconds and she was dead," said Leonor Sanchez Arroyo, a frail 73-year-old with a wrinkled face. While she had doubts that her newborn had really passed away, she said she did not dare argue with the nuns who ran the maternity because in those days "the word of a nun had as much value as that of kings." Just 21 when she gave birth and with little schooling, she also did not ask to be given the remains of her newborn so she could organise the burial herself. Nearly a half century later, her second daughter, Soledad Arroyo, now a journalist, saw a report on television about the theft of babies from that same clinic in Madrid.